Migrate VM from Hyper-V to vSphere with Pre-Installed VMware Tools

Note: This post is written specifically for VMware Tools 10. If you’re looking for a procedure that works with VMware Tools 11 or VMware Tools 12, you can see my latest blog post here.

One of things I rarely get to do is work with Hyper-V, however, I’m starting to get more exposure to it as I encounter more organizations that are either running all Hyper-V or are doing some type of migration between Hyper-V and vSphere.

One of the biggest challenges that I’ve both heard and encountered in my own testing is really around drivers. If you’re making the move from Hyper-V to vSphere, you’re going to have to figure out how to get your network settings migrated along with the virtual machines, whether manually or in a more automated way.

And yes! You can definitely use Zerto as the migration vehicle and take advantage of benefits like:

  • Non-disruptive replication
  • Automatic conversion of .vhdx to .vmdk (and vice versa)
  • Non-disruptive testing before migrating
  • Boot Order
  • Re-IP

For re-IP operations , Zerto requires that VMware Tools is installed running on the VMs you want to protect.

Zerto Administration Guide for vSphere

There are two ways to accomplish a cross-hypervisor migration or failover with Zerto.

Installing the VMware Tools is going to be required either way. If you choose to install the VMware Tools before migrating or protecting, you are going to get much better results.

Post-installation of the VMware Tools will prevent the capability to automatically re-IP or even keep the existing network settings, therefore, you will end up having to hand-IP every VM you migrate/failover, which seriously cuts into any established recovery time objective (RTO) and leaves more room for human error.

Overview

We will walk through what you need to do in order to get VMware Tools prepared for installation on a Hyper-V virtual machine. After that, there is a video at the end of this post that will pick demonstrate successful pre-installation of VMware Tools, replication, and migration of a VM from Hyper-V.

At the time of this writing, the versions of Zerto, Hyper-V, and vSphere that I have performed the steps that follow are:

  • Zerto 8.0
  • Hyper-V 2016
  • vSphere 6.7 (VMware Tools from 6.7 as well)

I also wanted to give a shout out to Justin Paul, who had written a similar blog post about this same subject back in 2018. You can find his original post here: https://bit.ly/3dfWKdm

Pre-Requisites

Like a recipe, you’re going to need a few things:

VMware Tools

You will need to obtain a copy of the VMware Tools, and it must be a version supported by your version of vSphere. You can use this handy >>VMware version mapping file<< to see what version of the tools you’d need.

You can get the tools package by mounting the VMware Tools ISO to any virtual machine in your vSphere environment, browsing the virtual CD-ROM, and copying all the files to your desktop. If you don’t have an environment available, you can also >>download the installer<< straight from VMware (requires a My VMware account).

Since you only need a few files from the installer package, start the installer on your desktop and wait for the welcome screen to load. Once that screen loads, if you’re on a physical machine (laptop, PC, etc…), you’re going to get a pop-up stating that you can only install VMware Tools inside a virtual machine. DO NOT dismiss this pop-up just yet.

  1. Go to Start > Run and type in %TEMP% , the press Enter.
  2. Look for a folder that follows this naming convention {VVVVVVVV-WWWW-XXXX-YYYY-ZZZZZZZZZZZZZ} followed by “-setup” appended to it and open it.

    Open this folder and copy the 3 files out of it to your desktop.
  3. Copy the following 3 files to a folder on your desktop: vcredist_x64.exe, vcredist_x86.exe, and VMware Tools64.msi

    3 Required Files to Copy
  4. Once you’ve saved the files somewhere else, you can now dismiss the popup and exit the VMware Tools installer.

Microsoft Orca

Microsoft Orca is a database table editor that can be used for creating and editing Windows installer packages. We’re going to be using it to update the VMware Tools MSI file we just extracted in the previous steps, to allow it to be installed within a Hyper-V virtual machine.

Orca is part of the Windows SDK that can be downloaded from Microsoft (https://bit.ly/3d7aWoZ). Download the installer, and not the ISO (it’s easier to get exactly what you want this way).

Run the installer and when you get to the screen where you’ll need to Select the features you want to install, select only MSI tools and complete the installation.

After installation is completed, you can search your start menu for “orca” or browse to where it was installed to and launch Orca.

Edit VMware Tools MSI with Orca

Now that we’ve got the necessary files we need, and Orca installed, we’re going to need to edit the VMware Tools MSI to remove an installer pre-check that prevents installation on any other platform than vSphere.

  1. Launch Orca
  2. Click Open, and browse to where you saved VMware Tools64.msi, select it, and click Open.

    Launch Orca and Open VMware Tools MSI
  3. In the left window pane labeled Tables, scroll down and click on InstallUISequence.
  4. In the right window pane, look for the line that says VM_CheckRequirements. Right-click on this entry, and select Drop Row.

    InstallUISequence srcset= VM_CheckRequirements > Drop Row”>
  5. Click save on the toolbar, and close the MSI file. You can also exit Orca now.

What next?

I’ve made you read all the way down to here to tell you that if you want to skip the previous steps and are looking to do this for vSphere 6.7, I have a copy of the MSI that is ready for installation on a Hyper-V virtual machine. If you need it, send me a message on Twitter: @eugenejtorres

Now that you’ve got an unrestricted copy of the VMware Tools MSI package. Copy the VMware Tools MSI along with the vc_redist(x86/x64) installers to your target Hyper-V VMs (or a network share they can all reach), and start installing.

Important: When installing VMware Tools on the Hyper-V virtual machine, you may get the following error:

If you receive the error above, it means you’re missing Microsoft Visual C++ 2017 Redistributable (x64) on that VM.

If this is the case, click cancel and exit the VMware Tools installer. Run the vcredist_x64.exe installer that you copied earlier, and then retry the VMware Tools Installer.

Demo

Since you’ve gotten this far, the next step is to test to validate the procedure. Take a look at the video below to see what migration via Zerto looks like after you’ve taken the steps above.

If you have any questions or found this helpful, please comment. If you know someone that needs to see this, please share and socialize! Thanks for reading!

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11 thoughts to “Migrate VM from Hyper-V to vSphere with Pre-Installed VMware Tools”

  1. Just an FYI, this seems to fail completely with VMware-tools-11.x, but works as expected with VMware-tools.10.x. I tried to debug whey 11.x was falling down, but didn’t get very far.

      1. Confirmed, the same process does not work for Tools 11, and Pete, yes, until another method is found, installing with 10.x and then upgrading afterwards works well too.

        1. Hello,

          Thanks for this blog post, very useful. I’ve just managed to get VMware Tools 11.3.5 installed on a Hyper-V VM. There’s a custom action “VM_LogStart” in the MSI: this tries to write a log entry to the VMware host (which obviously fails for a Hyper-V VM!)

          Simply dropping the VM_LogStart row from the CustomAction table should allow the install of VMWare Tools 11.x to succeed.

          Hope this helps!

  2. Thanks for this great post. It has helped me to smoothly migrate Hyper-V VMs. But as Peet said above, Tools 11 is completely different so this method doesn’t work.
    So I did the 10.x modification and then upgraded Tools post-migrate.

    1. Hi Mike, thanks for the comment – Have you tried using GPO to temporarily disable UAC in order to automate the deployment, then re-enable it? Could be an option with the scale you’re working with.

  3. Hi, to confirm this does work on VMTools version 12, please ensure you follow the comment from Chris – September 28, 2020 at 11:29 am

    Gene thanks for the straight forward write up. I’ll be pinching this for an internal KB at work. Will ensure to reference this link though.

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